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13 April 2013

I Years had been from Home

I Years had been from HomeAnd now before the DoorI dared not enter, lest a FaceI never saw beforeStare solid into mineAnd ask my Business there —"My Business but a Life I leftWas such remaining there?"I leaned upon the Awe —I lingered with Before —The Second like an Ocean rolledAnd broke against my ear —I laughed a crumbling LaughThat I could fear a DoorWho Consternation compassedAnd never winced before.I fitted to the LatchMy Hand, with trembling careLest back the awful Door should springAnd leave me in the Floor —Then moved my Fingers offAs cautiously as GlassAnd held my ears, and like a ThiefFled gasping from the House — F440 (1862) J609I can’t help but read this poem as a bit of a Gothic send-up. Rather than a ghost story it is seems like a ghost’s story. (I admit that this is a rather loose and idiosyncratic reading, but Dickinson has adopted this hushed, scary narrative style before.) We begin with what might seem a traditional homecoming: the narrator has been away for “Years.” But this turns out to be no nostalgic visit, no triumphal return, no happy reunion. Instead we soon realize that many years have passed and that the speaker is not a simple visitor wanting a glimpse of a place she once lived. Instead, as a ghost, her “Business” is what still lingers of her life in that place. But instead of simply entering the house – and no doubt frightening any occupants out of their wits – she is afraid of them. They might “Stare” at her and ask her business. At first she dawdles: she leans “upon the Awe” – her apprehension and terror; she lingers with the “Before,” that former time when she was at home here. This reflection takes but a “Second,” but what a second! Like an ocean, it rolled in to crash against her senses. It’s an amazing image of time: powerful, dangerous, inexorable. The living more typically conceive of time in terms of drops and sand. The “crumbling Laugh,” the ghost-narrator’s response to this onslaught of awe, is familiar to us from ghost stories. But while it sounds evil and spooky in those stories, here it is the sound of debilitating fear. But Dickinson, in addition to more existential questions is having some fun. After the build-up of Awe, Before, oceans breaking, and laughs crumbling, the narrator confesses that she’s simply mocking her own fear of a door that never did her any harm The poem continues in the tone of a tale told to a breathless audience. We see her fit her hand to the door “with trembling care”: she’s afraid the “awful Door” will be yanked open and pull her in so suddenly she’d fall. It’s a rather comical image. The visual imagery continues as we see her carefully let go of the latch and place her hands over her ears to run away “gasping.” Emily, the timid ghost.The poem works on other levels, of course. How would it feel to revisit yourself as you were years ago? It might be like staring at a stranger. How would it feel if you have moved so beyond the day-to-day concerns of the family that when you come down from your small, poetry-infested room, you want to flee “like a Thief”? Dickinson delved so deeply into the great existential questions that at times she must have truly felt transformed. Time might seem an Ocean; Home an “awful Door.”

This poem evoked for me the image of someone returning to church after a long absence. I like that 'Awe' becomes 'awful Door', a double meaning which is consonant with the ambivalent feelings Dickinson had about church. I like all the possibilities you suggest as well. It is wonderful when poems work on so many levels.

That's interesting about "Awe" and "awful Door". Later Dickinson will write, "Circumference, thou Bride of Awe" – a line I am still hoping to grasp. At any rate, it is a masculine quality – if she has the same sense of it here that she does later. It is clever to link the awe with the awful: at first the door stands for the terrible awe she feels. Later, as in the Home/House difference you identify below, it simply becomes an 'awful door'.

I see her as a spirit knocking on the womb's door to gain entrance and getting overwhelmed by the possibility of another incarnation , fleeing the scene to remain disembodied. Somewhat the way ED lived in her world in 19th century Amherst, not quite fully there yet endowed with a free spirit.

In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition it is said that a soon to be incarnating human watches from the spirit realm their embodied parents copulating and the gender the spirit is disgusted by is the gender, once it enters the womb, it will become.

Poem F 1038

Great Nature not to disappointAwaiting Her that Day —To be a Flower, is profoundResponsibility —

The Dickinson Blog Project

I plan to read and comment on all of Emily Dickinson's 1789 poems in chronological order. Scroll down to see earlier poems, or else browse the Archives. You can also use the Search function (below the Header). I think this is going to be a wonderful adventure!

I'm using R.W. Franklin's Reading Edition of the collected poems. I title the poems by the first line and at the end of the poem identify its Franklin number (e.g., F220) followed by the date Franklin assigns, and then by the numbers assigned by Thomas H. Johnson.